If Mad Men has argued anything over the past eight years, it's that there's no escaping from your past or yourself — which might be why, in this final run of episodes, Don Draper has finally stopped trying.
Mad Men began with a mystery: Who is Don Draper, and how awful are the skeletons in his closet? Don spent most of the series obsessively guarding his secrets from everyone, lying to his family and rejecting anyone from his past who tried to reach him. But it appears Bert Cooper's words from season one have become prophetic: Who cares? As the latest episode begins, Don tells a trio of women a story about his childhood in a whorehouse. "He loves to tell stories about how poor he was," teases Roger, a close friend who didn't know anything about Don's past for the vast majority of their relationship. "But not anymore."
With "Severance" — the beginning of the second half of season 7, and the last premiere the show will ever have — Mad Men resumes the story just a few months into the turn of the decade. (The episode isn't specific about the date on which it begins, but Richard Nixon gave the speech Don later watches on TV on April 30, 1970.) Mad Men's premiere episode was set in 1960, which means we've spent a full 10 years with these characters. But the hour has a bracingly cyclical feel as the characters try — and invariably fail — to break out of the patterns they've repeated over the course of the series.
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Don's willingness to address his unhappy childhood might seem like progress — but in reality, he's just traded one unhappy past for a more recent one. Throughout "Severance," Don is haunted, both metaphorically and literally, by the women who have left him behind. His date for a one-night stand — chosen, like a phone-in catalogue, from several willing women who contacted his message service — scrubs the floor in lingerie, as his soon-to-be ex-wife Megan once did in "A Little Kiss." His obsession with Di, a waitress at New York's saddest-looking diner, is triggered by her resemblance to a woman from his past (and in keeping with Don's penchant for slender brunettes, she sort of looks like most of them).
And then, of course, there's Rachel Menken — Don's primary affair from season one, and arguably his most memorable, returning as an actual phantom in Don's dream within the same week she dies from leukemia.
Don has spent Mad Men in a kind of horrible sweet spot: self-aware enough to imagine ways he can change, but self-destructive enough to repeatedly fail to do so. When he visits Rachel's apartment, where her family is sitting shiva, he gets a glimpse of the life they could have had if she had agreed to his insane plan to elope with him: two children, not entirely dissimilar to the children Don had when he and Rachel first met. But Rachel's sister is unmoved by Don's mourning for the life he never had with Rachel. "She lived the life she wanted to live," she says. "She had everything."
Don, as Roger reminds us at the top of the episode, doesn't have everything — but he does have money. When he returns to the seedy diner for a back-alley tryst with Di, he learns only later that she viewed it as a kind of transaction — payment for an absurdly large tip Roger left on a bill. ("You got your hundred dollars worth," she mutters. "You can go.") For a man born to a prostitute and raised in a whorehouse, it's a disturbingly Freudian backslide.
Mad Men's other characters aren't faring much better in their efforts to grow and change. Joan, having prostituted herself for a share in the company, continues to find that money and power don't stop an endless parade of men from trivializing her work while they leer at her. But Peggy's rejoinder is a reminder of the sacrifice she made to reach her position: "You're filthy rich. You don't have to do anything you don't want to." When Joan attempts to reassert control by ignoring a business call and going shopping, the salesgirl reminds her of her past by asking if she used to work there.
Meanwhile, Peggy warms up to a so-so blind date as soon as she hears herself being described as "fearless." She assumes that persona by suggesting they take an impromptu trip to Paris together. But in the morning, when the wine wears off, she grumbles her way through another morning at work. When Stan suggests she go through with the plan, she replies, "It's nothing that a couple aspirin won't fix" — as if spontaneity were a hangover headache you could wash away with some pills.
Perpetually unhappy Pete Campbell, having climbed to the lucrative, top-level position he so desperately wanted when Mad Men began, can only complain about the hassle his new fortune has wrought. "I didn't really get millions of dollars," he complains. "I mean, eventually. But it's dealt out in smaller increments to stay under that top tax threshold. I might have to buy an apartment building to hold on to any of it. And then I've got to be a landlord." The world may not weep for his struggles, but Pete Campbell will always be a victim.
And then there's Ken Cosgrove, who is suddenly fired just a day after his wife urges him to quit and pursue a writing career. This leads to an epiphany. "That's not a coincidence" he says. "That's a sign of the life not lived." But even as the universe conspires to push him into a new, happier life, he turns away, taking a job at Sterling Cooper client Dow Chemicals, which he'd described the night before as "a giant machine that makes weapons and poison." The move ensures he'll continue to circulate in the self-destructive atmosphere of the office that just let him go.
Given the cyclical nature of the episode, it's fitting that "Severance" ends by returning to the song that opened it: Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" It's as bleak and haunting a torch song as has ever been recorded. It's worth citing the final verse in full:
I know what you must be saying to yourselves.
"If that's the way she feels about it why doesn't she just end it all?"
Oh, no, not me.
I'm in no hurry for that final disappointment.
'Cause I know just as well as I'm standing here talking to you,
That when that final moment comes and I'm breathing my last breath
I'll be saying to myself: "Is that all there is?"
The song feels like a rejoinder to the conspiracy theorists who insist that the series finale will end with Don following his animated doppelganger from the Mad Men credits and leaping out of the office window. Yes, Mad Men has always been infused with death — but the deaths we're seeing in this final season are the spiritual kind that come with self-inflicted, self-perpetuating disappointment.
